John Miller became a chef by accident: As an undergraduate studying abroad in Japan, he took a restaurant job to make ends meet. In October, his culinary career took him overseas again — this time not to Japan, but to Erfurt, Germany, where he was part of the team that took bronze at the 2012 World Culinary Olympics.

The World Culinary Olympics, held every four years, are one of the highest-level culinary competitions in the world, says Miller, who is an instructor at The International Culinary School at The Art Institute of California - San Diego. More than 1,500 chefs from 50 countries compete in national and regional divisions. Miller’s team competed in the regional division, representing the southwestern United States. The team took 20th place, out of 45 teams, and was the second-ranked regional team from the United States.

Prior to the Olympics, Miller had been competing in the United States for eight years. He joined the regional team a year ago and trained for the world event by spending 20 hours per week preparing dishes and photographing them for the coaches and captains. The team members live in different cities and worked remotely with the exception of three in-person practice sessions.

“It was really only these three weekends that we worked together as a team,” Miller said. He adds that the struggle of working remotely was the biggest challenge during training.

At the Olympics, held from Oct. 5 to 10, the teams were tasked with creating complete meals in only a few hours. There were very specific requirements that vary according to division.

One of the dishes that Miller’s team created included a sampling of many types of pork: pork rack, pork leg, pork brains. Another dish centered on food of the southwestern United States; Miller said that this was particularly difficult because his formal training is not in Southwestern food, but rather in Asian and fusion cuisine. He did get to use his training when helping to make appetizers — and in the process of doing so, he learned a lesson about cultural differences.

“In most competitions in the U.S., what’s important is the diversity of ingredients and cooking techniques,” Miller said. “German judges didn’t know what a lot of my ingredients were, and they definitely weren’t comfortable with a lot of the Asian stuff. This worked to my disadvantage since it was not something that they could really judge that well.”

Of course, it’s a given that none of the challenges was easy, but Miller said that he appreciated the difficulty of the competition. The entire experience had an element of the surreal, he said, especially since the team slept only an hour and a half per night for five days.

“We were staying at a tiny inn in the middle of the German countryside with nothing except a hotel and houses; there wasn’t even a gas station,” he said. “Standing out there in the middle of nowhere, producing food at this level in the middle of the night — that was just the funniest experience.”

It’s an experience that he hopes to repeat in 2016, if the Art Institute can raise enough money to send the team again. Funding is crucial to success in the Culinary Olympics — one winning team, from Sweden, spent more than $500,000 during training.

Meanwhile, Miller is preparing for his master chef test, which is two years away. He’ll keep this experience in mind.

“Going to Germany was probably the most humbling thing I’ve ever had to do,” he said. “Everything I could do at gold medal level here was bronze medal material there. But it’s helpful; it’s good to be humbled in that way: You learn more from humbling experiences than from things that are easy.”